Zalman's New 8800 Cooler VF1000 LED + ZM-RHS88

ASIA911 said:
Thanks for the review but this doesn't tell us how much improvement this heatsink give out. Can you tell us what temp you were gettting with the stock heatsink with the same setup before and after installing the Zalman?

Can you tell us your room and system temp?
Click to expand...

Johnny78 said:
...
The air temp in my house without airconditioning is about 80 degrees EDIT: 27C
...
with the stock fan at 100% and an additional slot cooler my 8800 ultra idled at about 57 degrees celsius and ran at load at about 70 degree celsius
...
Click to expand...

It looks like ~8 degrees idle, ~11 degrees under load.
 
Johnny78 said:
Hey there everyone. Just installed the new Zalman tonight. I haven't had time to do a bunch of extensive testing on it but I'll go ahead and post some initial thoughts.

Installation took about 45 minutes. I've installed several VGA aftermarket coolers in the past and this one was definitely the most extensive I've installed so far but it was still fairly straight forward and simple to do. If you can follow instructions then you can install this card. Actually the trickiest part was removing the stock heatsink. Why don't they ever include instructions for removing the stock heatsink? I mean, really, the only people who are going to drop $85 bucks for this air cooler are pretty much the 8800 crowd only. Why not some pictures pointing out all the screws for the stock heatsink? Anyway, just a suggestion.

I have a EVGA superclocked 8800 ultra (the ultra cards have a full length heatsink shroud) and there were literally 23 screws holding the stock heatsink to the card. 23!!! Seems like a lot to me. Anyway, the most time consuming part was removing all these little suckers. After that was done the rest was cake.

You either like the look of this card or you don't. I personally think it looks great. It's not disappointing in the least up close. The entirely copper heatsink looks beautiful. In case you didn't know already, the fan spins with a blue light. It's pretty mellow, so don't expect it to overpower you with color. I have a blue CPU fan and a blue slot cooler so it looks nice in my case. Now, on to the testing.

For starters, like anyone will tell you, ambient temps play a huge role in affecting computer/gpu temps. I live in southern california where it's quite balmy right now. When I blast my air conditioning I can usually get about 6-8 degrees colder on my GPU readouts than without. For my first set of tests, I ran everything with the airconditioning turned off in my house. The air temp in my house without airconditioning is about 80 degrees (that's farenheight, I forget the conversion to celsius. Sorry I live in the states). Anyway, I purposely kept the ambient air temps hotter to see how this cooler really performed.

Anyway, I have good airflow in my case and with the stock fan at 100% and an additional slot cooler my 8800 ultra idled at about 57 degrees celsius and ran at load at about 70 degree celsius. Keep in mind I have my clocks set at 671 for the core, 1663 shader clock, and 2352 memory. I'm assuming these speeds are probably higher than your average 8800 so I would imagine my card is giving off more heat than your average 8800. With that said, my stock temps were pretty good.

So after installing the cooler and I checked my computer temps at idle and the GPU was now reading 49 degrees celsius. Hmm I said, looks pretty good. So, for my first set of tests I loaded Oblivion. I play this game at 1920X1200 with 16X AF and 16X AA with HDR enabled and I know these setting are taxing even for the most robust cards. Anyway, after about 45 minutes of gameplay I checked the temps and the GPU was at full load and reading 59 degrees celsius. After the game stopped, the GPU took about 5 mintues to fall back down to 50 degrees celsius.

Anyway, this is just my first run through. So far I'm very pleased. WIth my air conditioning on, I can probably acheive at least another 5 degrees colder. Considering how fast I have my card clocked I think the product works extremely well. Anyway, I have work I have to tend to but I'll try some more stress tests tomorrow.

My digital camera decided to take a shit on me so I couldn't take any high quality photos. I took some with my camera phone but they're not very clear. I can still post those if you like though.
Click to expand...

Really cool, actually this time I mean cool as in really cold! ;)

I installed my VF1000 yesterday and I must say I am very pleased. Can't give you any detailed data yet, but I can say this. A few degrees (celsius) lower temp @ idle with fan @ 100 %, about 50 C. After running ATI-tool "show 3d view" i got 63 C, but when playing Bioshock or Crysis BETA i had around 58 - 60 C.

I overclocked it and stock freq. is GPU: 576 MHz Memory: 1800 MHz and Shader: 1350 MHz, but with overclock I managed to get stable overclocking ("stable" = I manged to play for about 2 h, run 3dmark06 and run ATI-tool "look for artifacts" for a couple of minutes), GPU: 675 MHZ (somehow I couldn't change it to higher, must be this new BETA driver... because I could before) Memory: 2106 MHz and shader:1350 (no change), 17 % overclock for both GPU and Memory. I got no artifacts useing ATI-tool with 20 % overclock @ memory but it wasn't stable in Bioshock, so I lowered it a bit, I'll find out the limit maybe later today. Though, you shouldn't overclock to the edge, because one day it's a hot summerday and your system will crash! :]

For the record, I had 24 C (75.2 F) in the room for all testing, I usually wanna have about 21 C or 22 C.

Oh, I almost forgot! With stock cooler and when overclocking the GPU it effected the memory temps, I noticed that this is not the case with vf1000 and rhs88! To get a more stable overclock this is very much preferred!!!
 
sweYoda said:
Really cool, actually this time I mean cool as in really cold! ;)

I installed my VF1000 yesterday and I must say I am very pleased. Can't give you any detailed data yet, but I can say this. A few degrees (celsius) lower temp @ idle with fan @ 100 %, about 50 C. After running ATI-tool "show 3d view" i got 63 C, but when playing Bioshock or Crysis BETA i had around 58 - 60 C.

I overclocked it and stock freq. is GPU: 576 MHz Memory: 1800 MHz and Shader: 1350 MHz, but with overclock I managed to get stable overclocking ("stable" = I manged to play for about 2 h, run 3dmark06 and run ATI-tool "look for artifacts" for a couple of minutes), GPU: 675 MHZ (somehow I couldn't change it to higher, must be this new BETA driver... because I could before) Memory: 2106 MHz and shader:1350 (no change), 17 % overclock for both GPU and Memory. I got no artifacts useing ATI-tool with 20 % overclock @ memory but it wasn't stable in Bioshock, so I lowered it a bit, I'll find out the limit maybe later today. Though, you shouldn't overclock to the edge, because one day it's a hot summerday and your system will crash! :]

For the record, I had 24 C (75.2 F) in the room for all testing, I usually wanna have about 21 C or 22 C.

Oh, I almost forgot! With stock cooler and when overclocking the GPU it effected the memory temps, I noticed that this is not the case with vf1000 and rhs88! To get a more stable overclock this is very much preferred!!!
Click to expand...

How did you check memory temps? I would like to know the temp differences for the memory between stock cooler, HR-03 Plus, and Zalman rhs88 setup.
 
I've now done some more extensive overclocking and I find that these settings are stable:
GPU: 648 MHz; Shader: 1512 MHz; Memory: 2016 MHz;

This is with vf1000 fan @ 100 % and at max load, I've tested several games, such as, wc3, bioshock, lost planet, cs:s and I've also used ATI-tool, 3Dmark06 etc. I'm gonna look into overvoltage and changing graphic card BIOs to maybe overclock even more, but for now I'm really satisfied. I'm gonna wait for Crysis and results there until I overclock any further!

However, when I installed the cooler and were about to put on the thermal grease, I found out that the one I'd ordered had dried (Innovative Cooling Diamond 7 Carat)! So I had to use Zalmans own Thermal Grease with a thermal conductance of 1.2 W / mK while Innovative Cooling Diamond 7 Carat have a thermal conductance of 4.5 W / mK....... I'm gonna et back here when I've got a new Innovative Cooling Diamond 7 Carat.
 
"VENOM" in my sig

46cidle8800gtxtj1.jpg


This is with the stock fan removed from the VF1000 and a 12cm Yate zip-tied to it blowing towards the card.
 
Hi armyoffoo. You seem to have 3 12cm Noctua fans in your PC, why did you use Yate and not Noctua for the VF-1000?
 
sweYoda said:
Oh, I almost forgot! With stock cooler and when overclocking the GPU it effected the memory temps, I noticed that this is not the case with vf1000 and rhs88! To get a more stable overclock this is very much preferred!!!
Click to expand...
That's a good point. Since the GPU and VRAM heatsinks are separate now, in theory it would be easier to overclock them independently of each other.
 
Copyright said:
Fans on high? I was getting upper 50s at idle with default fan settings on the card. From what I was reading I was already getting better temps then most... 52C on a GTX ias awesome temps.
Click to expand...

I get around 50-55 idle depending on the weather outside with my 8800gtx with stock cooling.
 
thebeephaha said:
I get around 50-55 idle depending on the weather outside with my 8800gtx with stock cooling.
Click to expand...

Idle temps are not very interesting is it? You only wanna know the temps when 100 % load since you'd like to know if your card is stable when gaming, no?
 
I had to try it my self... changing zalmans own cooler to an 120 mm fan really made a difference! I actually got really nice results! If I just start up my PC and check the GPU Temp I'll get 46 C, but that's not idle temp dudes... After I've runned ATI-tool's "Show 3D Thing.." for a while and then check my temperature a couple of minutes later (after turning ATI-tool off) I get 49 C!!! How ever... With about 23 C in my room and this mighty overclock i reach 58 C at @ 100 % load. Before I had changed the Fan, I got about 63 C @100 % load! and 53 C idle! I'd say that's a hell of a improvement imo... Memory Temp is 37 C idle, under 100 % load the temp. is 48 C tops. I really which I could volt mod without changing any resistors, then I'd do it! If I'd destroy the card when changing resistors I would get crazy! Don't have the money to lose it! To bad you can not volt mod through the graphics cards BIOs like with a CPU...

I've overclocked my Gainward 8800GTX to: GPU: 675 MHz; Shader Clock: 1620 MHz & Memory to 2016 MHz; This seem to be the most stable clock, I ran 3Dmark06 and got 12615 score! :D !
 
Installed mine last night.

- Used Arctic Silver Ceramique on the GPU.
- Sleeved the fan cable and plugged it into the motherboard since the damn connector is not compatiable with the video card's onboard fan connector.
- Also notice that all my other major heatsinks are Zalman. I lapped the Northbridge and CPU heatsink, lapped my Core 2 and used AS Ceramique on everything. I'm pretty proud of the setup at this point. *shrug*

***Sorry the pix are so big...just got a new Sony camera that takes 1920x1080 photos. Fun to view them on my HDTV! ;)

DSC00171.JPG



DSC00173.JPG
 
jebo_4jc said:
However, something I think a lot of people that are saying "screw heatsinks go with water" are forgetting is, waterblocks are not universal either, unless you go with something that cools only the GPU itself lake a Maze4, which wouldn't work for something like an 8800 anyway. So, everytime nvidia/amd change the reference design, you have to buy a new cooler, whether you go with water or air. And waterblocks are still almost 2x as expensive as even this new Zalman beast, so water is still considerably more expensive.
Click to expand...

MCW60-R? It costs $44 from Jab-Tech, comes with G80 mountings, and via $8 adapters is essentially universal. I'm sure it'll give you vastly superior performance as well, compared to this monstrosity. I'm still aghast at how expensive this thing is...

Anyway, I'm not arguing that water would overall be cheaper, but waterblocks themselves aren't nearly as expensive as you make them out to be. Especially if you already have a loop, going with something like the MCW60-R is much more cost effective.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top